Thanks, Buck, for setting this all up. I'll be voting (and posting) on your site as soon as I get my email for registration (probably as soon as I finish typing this response).

We should continue to remind everyone here of this, and perhaps even mention it on the other puppet boards around (and I know, Buck, that you are familiar with them all. Perhaps you've even done this already).

I'm very excited to both participate in this as well as see the contributions from others. If nothing more this will be very interesting.

Buck -- the one thing I didn't see covered in your rules was the size of the video -- does this mean you will be down (or up) converting video as it comes in? Even if you plan on offering this, you might want to "suggest" that folks keep their submissions to a certain size (I'd suggest 320x240). Otherwise I can guarantee you that you'll be receiving full D1 NTFS DF submissions from some folks (and even at 60 seconds those will be rather large files :>)

Hmmmm, I'm a little worried that so far we only have four votes for topics on Buck's site -- come on, folks, don't you want to participate? Or are you just laying low and going with whatever topic is decided?

Tomorrow night is the deadline (appropriately enough, considering) so get your butts on over there and vote! We need more than four!

Hmmmm, I'm a little worried that so far we only have four votes for topics on Buck's site -- come on, folks, don't you want to participate? Or are you just laying low and going with whatever topic is decided?

Tomorrow night is the deadline (appropriately enough, considering) so get your butts on over there and vote! We need more than four!

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I wouldn't worry too much, when I ran the puppet building contest we had 500 unique visitors, over 1,000 hits and only 30 actual votes. Same thing here with Muppetcentral, there are 2000+ registered members but thousands more visitors I'm sure.

If there's one thing we've learned from Kevin Costner it's that "if you build it, they will come."

Ouch! And, what a fine family event that looked to be. Jack Daniels and little junior in tow..... *shaking head laughing*

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Actually, this year's Puppet Palooza - which in reality has nothing to do with puppets at all except for the three puppets the event was named for (it's a long story related to the band's trips that most of the fans go on each year) - was toned down and much tamer than in previous years. This was both because the band's fans have grown up a bit, and because the event's founder, Joe Gallagher, made some adjustments to the overall party mood at the request of his late father, who lost his battle with cancer earlier this year. His dad specifically requested that the booze be toned down and that it should be less of a drink-fest and more of a family event, and trust me, that's exactly how it was this year! :-D

Incidentally, I'm the Webmistress and photographer for both the band as well as the PuppetPalooza.com Web site's owner... and not only was I six months pregnant at the event (I can be seen in some photos singing with the band, though I wasn't that big, so it may not be too obvious that I'm pregnant there), but several other fans have also had babies this year or were pregnant and in attendance. I see from my site stats that some of you did surf the site based on the link posted here, but you may not have made it far enough to see all the babies that turned up!

Incidentally, the site's owners probably won't care if you use the name Puppet Palooza, but I've seen other places on the Web that have also used that name. We just happen to own the dot-com domain...